NAME

sfq - Stochastic Fairness Queueing

SYNOPSIS

tcqdisc...perturb seconds quantum bytes

DESCRIPTION

Stochastic Fairness Queueing is a classless queueing discipline
available for traffic control with the tc(8) command.
SFQ does not shape traffic but only schedules the transmission of
packets, based on ’flows’. The goal is to ensure fairness so that each
flow is able to send data in turn, thus preventing any single flow from
drowning out the rest.
This may in fact have some effect in mitigating a Denial of Service
attempt.
SFQ is work-conserving and therefore always delivers a packet if it has
one available.

ALGORITHM

On enqueueing, each packet is assigned to a hash bucket, based on
(i) Source address
(ii) Destination address
(iii) Source port
If these are available. SFQ knows about ipv4 and ipv6 and also UDP, TCP
and ESP. Packets with other protocols are hashed based on the 32bits
representation of their destination and the socket they belong to. A
flow corresponds mostly to a TCP/IP connection.
Each of these buckets should represent a unique flow. Because multiple
flows may get hashed to the same bucket, the hashing algorithm is
perturbed at configurable intervals so that the unfairness lasts only
for a short while. Perturbation may however cause some inadvertent
packet reordering to occur.
When dequeuing, each hashbucket with data is queried in a round robin
fashion.
The compile time maximum length of the SFQ is 128 packets, which can be
spread over at most 128 buckets of 1024 available. In case of overflow,
tail-drop is performed on the fullest bucket, thus maintaining
fairness.

PARAMETERS

perturb
Interval in seconds for queue algorithm perturbation. Defaults
to 0, which means that no perturbation occurs. Do not set too
low for each perturbation may cause some packet reordering.
Advised value: 10
quantum
Amount of bytes a flow is allowed to dequeue during a round of
the round robin process. Defaults to the MTU of the interface
which is also the advised value and the minimum value.

EXAMPLE&USAGE

To attach to device ppp0:
# tc qdisc add dev ppp0 root sfq perturb 10
Please note that SFQ, like all non-shaping (work-conserving) qdiscs, is
only useful if it owns the queue. This is the case when the link speed
equals the actually available bandwidth. This holds for regular phone
modems, ISDN connections and direct non-switched ethernet links.
Most often, cable modems and DSL devices do not fall into this
category. The same holds for when connected to a switch and trying to
send data to a congested segment also connected to the switch.
In this case, the effective queue does not reside within Linux and is
therefore not available for scheduling.
Embed SFQ in a classful qdisc to make sure it owns the queue.